Secret City : The Hidden History of Gay Washington

Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City.

For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” paradoxically held enormous, terrifying power.

Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, from FDR through Clinton is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” award-winning journalist and author James Kirchick illuminates how the idea of homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration, impacting everything from the creation of America’s earliest civilian intelligence agency to the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the struggle for African American civil rights, and the conservative movement.

Celebrating the men and women who courageously decided that the source of their private shame could instead be galvanized for public pride, Kirchick offers a reinterpretation of American history told from the perspective of the citizens who lived in its shadows.

Sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.

“Secret City is a sweeping, grand look at what once was forced to be hidden. In his deeply researched narrative, Kirchick has restored men and women lost to history due to their sexuality, and in doing so he shines a new light on our understanding of politics and government. Evoking memories of And the Band Played On, this look at the 'secret city' makes our history clear.”
—John A. Farrell, author of Richard Nixon: The Life

“Henry James called Washington DC the city of conversation, but it's also the city of hypocrisy and witch hunts, and, in The Secret City, a brutal homophobia that can still make the blood boil years after the events. Kirchick takes us from the FDR administration to Bill Clinton with a thoroughness and eye for detail that astonish. Lovers of Washington lore will enjoy the depiction of gay life in the nation's capital when it was entirely underground, and lovers of justice will take pleasure in the fact that some of the most repulsive characters in modern political history who ruined the lives of careers of men as disparate as Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles, and Lady Bird Johnson's interior decorator are brought to justice in the only way they can be now: the historical record.”
—Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance